Conservatives have significantly better sex lives than their left-leaning rivals, a new survey has found. Of 19,000 respondents in Europe, 73% of right-leaning voters were happy with their sex lives, compared to 66% of lefties.
But why might this imbalance occur, and why does it matter that left wing voters are less happy about their sexual habits?
“Voters don’t generally sit down to read and compare the manifestos, so we have to look at what is influencing them,” Joe Twyman, Head of Political and Social Research at YouGov, told Heat Street.
“We all have presumptions about how the attitudes of right wing people and left wing people differ, from whether we think they’ll get on with our friends, to how interesting they are as people, to how good they are in bed. This research on the electorate is important because the stories we tell each other and ourselves about the differences between the parties and their associated supporters plays an important part in how we decide how to vote.”
Though it’s unclear whether the result of their study will cause a swing towards conservatism for the sake of better sex, Twyman offered an idea of why it is that a supporter of, say, British Prime Minister Theresa May might be more sexually content than a Labor voter: “My sense is that right wingers are more satisfied because generally they are more content with what they have, and also their expectations are lower.”
But social psychologist and Harvard prof Dr. Justin Lehmiller doesn’t agree that their implications of the YouGov study are important or representative. He said: “These results are being blown way out of proportion. Regardless of political ideology, the vast majority of people across countries were sexually satisfied. It’s important to keep in mind that we’re talking about pretty small differences between groups here.”
He does, however, offer some insight as to why a conservative bias towards sexual contentment may exist “It’s possible that these findings don’t tell us anything about how our political views affect our sex lives and, instead, reveal something about how having more versus fewer sexual partners is linked to sexual satisfaction.
“Perhaps right-wing folks more strongly adhere to conservative religious beliefs, thereby increasing the odds that they abstained from sex until marriage. When people only have one partner, they do not have a comparison level. As such, they’re likely to be satisfied with their sex lives no matter what because they don’t know what they might be missing out on. By contrast, the left-wing folks might have had more partners and, therefore, have established a standard of comparison.”
So are left-leaning voters more sexually prolific? Sexting-obsessed Anthony Weiner and British Member of Parliament MP Keith Vaz (currently embroiled in a rent-boy scandal) will be pleased to know that they are not the only left-leaners to favor some of the more, er, adventurous forms of sexual expression; evidence seems to support the theory.
A 2014 YouGov survey, in which Twyman first focused on the intersection of sexuality and political opinion, found that Labor supporters were statistically more likely than supporters of other parties to enjoy oral sex (giving and receiving- true to their socialist roots), passionate kissing, role play and wearing sexy outfits.
On the same thread, (also lefty) voters in Britain’s far left Liberal Democratic favored bondage and watching someone masturbate, whilst Brexit fans in the right-wing U.K. Independent Party disproportionately focused the use of vibrators and dildos. In terms of props, roleplay and other less “vanilla” sexual behaviours, however, conservatives were found to be pretty… conservative.
But is it all a matter of taste, or are lefties wired fundamentally differently to righties?
Many political scientists and political psychologists now believe that what makes us either conservative or liberal is influenced by our personality, psychology, physiology and genetics.
Current thinking is that the cognitive-motivational styles of liberals and conservatives are quite different.
Conservatives, for example, have been found to be more easily (cognitively and neurologically) affected by environmental dangers. Perhaps higher anxiety leads to higher need for control over environment (defense, social boundaries, rules and regulations, religious inclinations) which leads to the more constrained sexual appetites, lower expectations, and more contentment with their lot.
It is perhaps the case that both our political persuasion and sexual satisfaction are coded somewhere in our internal settings, rather than being the result of external influences, circumstances, or conscious subjective choice.
We may have to wait until the 2020 election to find out whether this latest YouGov study influences voter behaviour, but in the meantime conservatives have something extra to smile about.
Featured image credit: Bryan Brenneman/Flickr